I’ve worked for cleantech venture capital firms DBL Investors and Israel Cleantech Ventures and reported about environmental innovation for the Los Angeles Times, Business Week, Greentech Media, GreenBiz and VentureBeat.

I'm a student at the Yale Law School and a former college basketball writer for Fox Sports. Before school, I worked on Capitol Hill and on presidential, gubernatorial and congressional campaigns. As an advisor to candidates throughout the western United States, I helped to elect eight Members of Congress, including wind energy engineer-turned Congressman Jerry McNerney. Follow me on twitter @Cohen_Yoni.

Q: What are a few of NEA’s recent investments about which you are particularly excited?

A:Soraa is a follow-on investment we made in 2011. We are very excited about that investment [and] the LED space. Soraa is a disruptive LED company. Another LED investment we made is Firefly Green Technologies.

LEDs or more broadly the demand side is where we are spending a lot of [our] time. A lot of very interesting market shifts [are] happening in the LED space in the transition away from incandescent [light bulbs]. The problem with LEDs for many years has been cost. As technologies continue to improve – and in the companies we’re involved with, [LEDs] are coming down the cost curve significantly and their performance has gotten better – it is going to be a really big market. We also have a Chinese company, Shenghui Lighting, for downstream LEDs… If you think the market [in the United States] is going to be big, it has already gotten massive in China.

We [also] continue to be excited about energy storage. At least on the [energy] supply side, it is one of the holy grails. Whether it is stationary, distributed, or distributed and mobile – laptops, cellphones and even transportation – that is a massive market. We’ve invested in a company called Leyden Energy.

Q: Numerous LED companies come across your desk. Why did NEA make the initial investment in Soraa? What progress has the company made that justified the follow-on investment?

A: We had been looking at LEDs for many years. Fundamentally, we didn’t get comfortable with the technology evolution. A lot of times [there were] material claims that we fundamentally didn’t believe. We just didn’t get excited about the cost coming down. Five, 10 years ago there was a lot more competitive pressure with some of the big players. Now you have some really disruptive companies and technologies that are starting to see the light of day in terms of commercial launch. It is too big a market to not have a lot of big players.

I got a graduate degree at UC Santa Barbara so I knew about the [Soraa] team, probably the best LED team in the world. Dr. Shuji Nakamura is one of the pioneers in the LED space. He started Soraa along with a couple other professors. It was a fundamental architecture difference. It’s using a different type of architecture that increases performance and significantly reduces cost. If we married the [founding] team with the potential with what they’ve already proven, it was too exciting for us not to invest. Since then, they’ve made tremendous progress in building out the business team, a world-class team, and in [developing] the product. [Soraa] is going to have a big year.

Q: You highlighted NEA’s investment Leyden Energy, a producer of advanced lithium-ion batteries based on a lithium-imide electrolyte. The company recently announced an agreement with Powermat to pursue wireless cell phone charging. How does Leyden Energy decide which applications to pursue?

A: One reason they’ve chosen the [cell phone market] it is because it is such a massive pain point, especially as you get into 4G and video, bandwidth intensive applications that sap energy from these devices, tablets and smart phones. Obviously there is a massive pain point, but there are a lot of people going after the pain point. I think there will be a lot of great companies created.

In energy storage, we need to see data. Over the years, there have been lots and lots of claims, but it is important to see the data and the progress. First, we need to see that [a company’s technology] really is disruptive, materially better performance and cost characteristics than the best in class today. We need to see data that shows a believable roadmap. Leyden Energy had prototypes and customers [who] had started to really engage.

With the operational expertise we have in the [NEA] partnership, we think we can help companies. We fund them really, really early [and] as they get into operational scale-up, we can really be helpful.

Q: More broadly, what’s the energy storage opportunity?

A: The market is big because the applications are massive. First, grid scale. Look at energy generation, solar and wind. Look at the massive uptake in the next five, 10 years. In the US, the renewable portfolio standards [mandate] that a certain amount of energy needs to be generated through renewables by 2020 or 2030. You can’t have [high levels of renewable] energy generation without energy storage.

Beyond grid scale, look at the electrification of the transportation industry. Batteries are the bottleneck in terms of costs for many electric vehicles. Mobile is a [third] paradigm for energy storage. Finally, off-grid applications with distributed generation are going to be massive. We [invested] in a company, Deeya Energy, that deals with that in emerging markets. We get excited when [a company’s technology] has lots of applications, lots of markets, each of which are multi-billion dollar markets and there is a real pain point and a problem you can solve through innovation. That is a hallmark of how we invest in general, but certainly that holds true in energy storage.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.